


For the Want of a (non-magical, relatively inexpensive) Bedside Table

by storiewriter



Series: Bentley Farkas and Friends [29]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Disability, Domestic Fluff, Family, Family Fluff, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, I did not intend to get into how disruptive Bentley's current disability would be to him in his life, Magical Disability, Slice of Life, This is actually mostly fluff somehow, but you know what, he's gonna have a Time Of It, in a world where technology is entwined with magic more often than not, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:02:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23904304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storiewriter/pseuds/storiewriter
Summary: Bentley, Torako, and Dipper move into the house they bought in Closing Costs--slowly, over the span of a couple months, because furniture these days is largely made with Convenient Magical Additions that aren't all that convenient when you have a visual sensitivity to magic (Bentley), an immovable stubbornness about having both a couple of bedside tables AND furniture that doesn't compromise your partner's ability to be comfortable in his own bedroom (Torako), or a lasting derision for KEIA furniture because they stiffed you years ago when you were requisitioning furniture for your son-nemesis (Dipper).Somehow, they make it work.
Relationships: Torako & Bentley & Dipper
Series: Bentley Farkas and Friends [29]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/278475
Comments: 18
Kudos: 53





	For the Want of a (non-magical, relatively inexpensive) Bedside Table

**Author's Note:**

> Tooth (toothpastecanyon on tumblr) told me that she'd read a fic about Bentley watching paint dry, and that blossomed into this 10k monstrosity that is almost all fluff with just a tiny sprinkling of angst, so thank you tooth.

The first thing Torako did when they officially moved in was spend a solid day integrating new security wards into the ceilings, around the outside of the house where the walls joined with the roof, and along the edges of every window and doorframe. The second thing she did was enlist Dipper’s help to bring all the furniture they didn’t want or need to the recycling center, where a very nice satyr wearing a baseball cap tried to charge them an exorbitant amount of money to take care of their belongings. Dipper managed to convince him to go down, seeing as the satyr was very nice, but he refused to budge past a certain point because of what he said were “handling fees.” Torako, very cognizant of the fact that they had just paid a gross amount of money for a house, reluctantly pulled out her wallet and paid the money.

Bentley was thankfully not around. Otherwise, he actually might have accepted Dipper’s deal to just get rid of it for them. Even then, when he came home and Torako showed him the receipt, his first instinct was to say, “We could have used the bedside tables anyways, you know, they weren’t that old—”

“Don’t even try selling it to me, they were bad,” Torako said. “One of them fell apart when we dropped it off. Besides, now we can get new ones!”

Unfortunately, as they soon rediscovered, extra-dimensional storage spaces were all the rage, and new furniture without those specs was…nonexistent, to say the least. And while Bentley could use tools and such for short periods of time with his glasses…

“I guess we don’t need them?” Bentley said, blinking furiously as he set his magic-cancelling eyeglasses back on the bridge of his nose. His vision swum a little, the glimmering of magics and extra-dimensional spaces burning into phosphenes in the back of his left eyelid. Even he wasn’t ready to consider the possibility of living with something like that in the room he slept in. “We can just, I don’t know, use the floor. For now. Until we find a better solution.”

Torako put one hand on her hip. In the other, she held a store tablet, on which was their virtual shopping cart. In it was one new desk chair, an old-fashioned air-drying dishrack, and approximately thirty-seven picture frames of various shapes and sizes and non-magical for the most part. He certainly wasn’t telling her that the holding pins in several of them had minor enchantments to promote longevity. They didn’t bother him too much anyways.

“Unbelievable,” Torako said. She scowled at the example bedside table display before them like the pieces had offended her, personally, for the sake of offending her alone. “Terrible. What a disgrace. You can’t have a home without bedside tables! KEIA, esteemed furniture store to serve the people, should know this. And yet! Here we are!”

“Esteemed?” Bentley asked, raising an eyebrow at Torako. “The furniture is good, but it’s not exactly a posh place.”

“It’s better than it used to be,” Dipper said from behind them, where he was appraising floor lamps even though they didn’t need any, really, one was still functioning and the other two had found very good homes elsewhere. Bentley didn’t understand why either of them couldn’t listen to reason. “It’s still affordable, but at least they aren’t accepting illegally forested lumber from protected lands in Hungary.”

“From where?” asked Bentley, twisting around to look at Dipper. “Hungary, I don’t—is this another one of those really old countries that doesn’t exist under that name any more?”

Dipper nodded and hummed absentmindedly. “The faux-metal is kind of weak on this one, though, it’s probably not the best choice…”

Torako ignored both of them. “I thought KEIA was a furniture store for ‘Every person, no matter who,’ but no, clearly not, not with _those_ customization options.”

“You’re telling me,” Dipper groused. He flicked the wide, elegant hood of one lamp and made a disgruntled noise. “They wouldn’t let me custom-build furniture for Toby that included the Nightmare Sheep because the sheep were ‘clearly demonic’ and it ‘went against company guidelines for appropriate alterations.’ Sucks to be them, though, because I just did it _myself_ , and you know what? Toby loved it. So did the sheep, actually; they wouldn’t stop hounding me about being included in future pieces.”

Bentley, half-turned around, saw an older man frown in their direction. “Uh,” he said, “You mean, Tyrone, you did it with your excellent carving skills, and only because KEIA wouldn’t honor your creative differences, and the sheep were part of a dream and okay that’s enough let’s go home, clearly we aren’t finding anything here.”

They didn’t get anything at KEIA.

In fact, they didn’t even get anything moved into the new house at first, because Torako was seized by the mad idea that if they were going to make this house their own, they needed to redecorate _all_ the walls first. Bentley stared at her, blank-faced in the middle of the night when she came to this realization, before she sheepishly tucked him back in and said that they could talk about it after he came back from work the next day.

Upon doing so, he was hustled to the new house by Torako and Dipper, who had procured paint and paintbrushes courtesy of Dipper’s house in the nightmare realm. Bentley looked at the paint cans, set down in the middle of a thin but sturdy tarp covering the entirety of the house floors (it glimmered, just a little, to his uncovered left eye), and pursed his lips.

“Um,” he said, pointing at one which—while new-looking, was covered in an archaic form of English that made his head hurt to try to decipher—“does that say, by chance, that it expires in May of 2152?”

Dipper hummed and lifted the can in question. “Close, that actually says March.”

Even Torako, whose judgment was not always to be trusted on these matters, squinted at the paint can. Distrust crinkled into the corners of her eyes. “But he got the year right?”

“Yeah, 2152. Not _that_ long ago, I’m sure it’ll be fine! It was in the Nightmare Realm anyways. That place preserves stuff like nothing else.”

“Dipper,” Bentley said. He tried to ignore the one paint tin he couldn’t make heads or tails of. He suspected it was in an entirely different language from any that currently existed. “Saying things like ‘oh, it was in the _nightmare realm_ ’ doesn’t exactly instill a sense of relief in me.”

Dipper stuck out his tongue. Torako set down the pthalo green she was holding. “I hate to ask,” she said, “But will there be any bad…side effects from using this paint? Is it—is it even up to modern code?”

“Ah,” Dipper said. He went slightly cross-eyed. Golden ichor brimmed up from under his eyes until they overflowed, trickling sluggishly over the slight swell of his cheeks. A scent not dissimilar to smoldering peat rose faint into the air. Bentley felt the hair on the back of his neck and along his arms rise on end. Torako shifted her weight as Dipper’s hair rose in a wind that affected him alone. They waited.

Moments later, he blinked. His hair fell back to its normal flouncy poofiness. “Oh wow, gross,” he said, and used his gloved claws to wipe away the golden—blood tears?—from off his cheeks and out of his eyes. His nose curled up. “That’s a sensation—hey, wanna feel it? It’s a wild texture.”

“Haha, no thanks, I’ll pass,” said Torako, who had learned many things since having her arm accidentally broken when they were college babies. “Anyways—did you find out if the paint was up to modern code?”

“Um, so the can you’re holding is fine, and so is 2152! They hadn’t tried to introduce petrichorite to paint, yet. By the way, petrichorite _is_ in Baby Mint #295 from 2799, so we should figure out how to dispose of that—but not with Tad, because he charged us an arm and a leg for our trash last time.”

Torako’s brow furrowed. “Tad—do you mean Felix, the satyr at the recycling center? Where we dropped off those bedside tables that were in _very bad condition_?”

Bentley ignored her side-eye-accompanied pointed comment, put his hands on his hips and counted the paint cans in front of them. “So, back on topic—out of the twenty-three paint cans here, which ones aren’t viable?”

In the end, they pulled eight cans that would guarantee nasty side-effects from the collection, then the colors ‘Purple Olive’ and ‘Peat Moss’ because they weren’t personal favorites. Bentley took Torako’s pthalo green and a container each of black, gold, and what Dipper assured him was a ‘non-haunted glow-in-the-dark white’ to the bedroom while Dipper and Torako haggled over whether to use a deep red or an ultramarine as the accent wall color in the living room.

Bentley set down the paint cans, then retrieved and prepared brushes of varying sizes and widths. He had to pop open the lid of the pthalo green with the end of one paintbrush, but the others opened easy enough when he pressed and held his thumbs to the (antiquated) locking systems on opposite sides of the rim. The somewhat suffocating smell of paint was quick to fill the room, and it drove him to opening a window.

It had started drizzling, actually. Bentley stood there a moment and let the fresh rainwater air waft in, hands flat against the sill, head against the bottom edge of the frame he’d just moved out of the way. If he closed his eyes and just listened, he could hear the light tapping of rain against the leaves of the Sweetbay Mongolia tree growing only a few meters away. He took a deep breath, then ducked back inside.

Time passed.

Three of the walls were slowly painted in the pthalo green. Between coats of that color, he worked on covering the ceiling, the trimmings, and the wall across from the door with black, glasses on and a PaintKnight shield over his head to keep the worst of the paint off his face and clothes. He rolled the paint on until his shoulders ached and he couldn’t quite get the wet sound of the roller out of his head, even when he paused to work out the kinks in his arms. The rain outside dropped heavier, echoing against the roof and in through the open windows in a way that settled something in Bentley.

Eventually, he finished the final coat of black on the ceiling. Setting down the roller across the paint well, Bentley set his hands on his hips and arched his back. His spine popped and cracked a little. He winced, then leaned forward to touch his toes.

There was a knock at the door before it slid open into the wall. “Hey, Bentley. Dips and I were thinking of finishing for the day.”

Bentley straightened up from his stretch slowly, arching a little past the twinge in his lower back. He blinked at Torako, then asked, “Did any paint actually get _on_ the walls, or did you plaster it all over each other?”

“Harr harr harr,” Torako said. She pouted at him, face almost entirely red from what Bentley assumed from the texture was a paint roller. Her bangs on the left side were clumped together and spiking up a little. “So funny, Bentley. Yes, we managed to get the living room done, though I still think that the ultramarine would have looked better.”

“We can touch up the bathroom with it,” Bentley said. He bent down to pick up the roller. “So we clean up and start making dinner back at the apartment?”

Torako wrinkled her nose. “I guess we have to wait a day for the paint to dry before moving anything in, don’t we.”

“And I’m not done,” Bentley said. He twisted the handheld portion of the roller off so that it would be easier to carry. Paint-smell wafted up and overwhelmed the clear scent of rain from outside. “So the earliest we could be in here would be the day after tomorrow—honestly, though, we should plan on a week.”

A rustle of cloth; Bentley turned his head to catch Dipper sticking his very colorful fingers down the side of Torako’s neck. She squealed, then cocked her elbow and slammed it into Dipper’s gut. Bentley laughed at the expressions on both of their faces.

“Could be worse,” Dipper wheezed, even though he didn’t actually _need_ the air. What a drama king, Bentley thought to himself. “It used to take like, a week to safely dry, not just a day.”

“Still,” Torako said. She put her fingers to the paint smeared across her neck and scrunched her nose up at the sensation. “It’s a long time, now that we finally own the house. Nothing else is stopping us from moving in and it makes me _itch_. ”

“Well,” Bentley said, pointing the still-black roller at her and grinning a little to take the bite out of his words, “the end is at least in sight, now.”

She stuck out her tongue at him, then gacked when the dark red smeared on her lips came in contact with it. “Uuuugghhhhh, ewwww,” she said, and disappeared to the bathroom to the sound of Dipper cackling.

Bentley raised his eyebrow at Dipper. Dipper looked back at him. They both shared a grin, shook hands, and Dipper made off with Bentley’s freely-given roller still saturated with black paint.

Bentley looked down at the non-haunted glow-in-the-dark white and the ‘Guaranteed to Glimmer!’ gold. He remembered that he still had some old brushes back in his desk at the apartment. Torako screeched, and then Dipper did, their voices echoing through the mostly-empty house in a way that filled it. Bentley thought about what they would best like for dinner tonight.

He turned, closed the window, and brought the trays out of the room to wash them. As he paused to try to remember where the bathroom was, he was smacked in the face with the very roller he’d just lent to Dipper for nefarious purposes, and well, that just meant that payback was due, right?

They ended up ordering pizza.

* * *

Bentley had an early shift the next day so that he could be home in time for lunch at one. He’d dragged himself through about three hours of work on nightmare-riddled sleep before Karl Svinhish took one look at him and made Bentley sleep in the break room for ninety minutes. Even then, once Bentley woke up, he sent Bentley packing home with orders to ‘not try to explode us all through lack of sleep, don’t worry, we’re still paying you.’ Once back in the apartment, Bentley managed to crash on their (unfortunately, permanently magical) couch for a couple hours before he woke up from fear-anxiety-pain. In all, he managed to eat, pack up, and be out to the house by about 1:30. With Dipper out visiting somebody he vaguely knew in Europe, and with Torako having snagged a small case in the area to find a missing cat, he was alone.

If he’d been alone in that apartment, it would have been one terrible thing. Being alone in the house—where the wards were freshly installed, the layout was completely different, and the only items that really glimmered to his left eye were temporary parts of their life—was another thing entirely. After he opened the window, Bentley slid on his glasses, activated the PaintKnight shield, and flipped through the music in his phone before settling on Comeback Kid’s Greatest Hits. Torako had introduced him to them, ages ago when they were both fourteen and not-studying in Bentley’s room. It seemed fitting, considering that he was going to paint parts of his childhood bedroom into this place.

He lay back on the EZ-Liftr Lite they’d rented from a nearby library and thumbed at the controls until he was comfortably near the ceiling. After a moment of contemplation, he angled himself just a little bit up. Pulling a brush out of his apron pocket, he slid it into the glow-in-the-dark white and began to paint.

It had been so long that the first stars turned out a little lopsided, edges a bit wonky where he still struggled to re-adjust to painting with a brush. The angle didn’t help; any time he’d painted in the past, it was either upright on a canvas or flat on a desk, not several meters above the ground and on his back. So they were a bit odd, bigger than he’d initially planned as he tried to mask the mistakes, less neat than he knew he was capable of. It would have frustrated him to tears just months ago. It still kind of did. But now, he breathed through the frustration and settled himself with the knowledge that he would adjust—it would just take time. It was a not-bad day, so the reminder worked.

It was around the fourth song that things started to finally click. Using an extra-long paintbrush handle to steady his painting hand, Bentley drew a small seven-pronged star to the brassy trumpets of Comeback Kid’s “Horse in a Hospital” and didn’t wobble at all. His lines were clean and clear, the shape was even, and filling it in wasn’t nearly the exercise in concentration that the first few had been. Outlining in gold was just as easy. Bentley smiled a little to himself, refilled the brush, and continued.

Over time, the light coming in from the bedroom windows shifted into the deeper warmer tones of evening, shadows from the overgrown garden stretching further into the room as it set. The bedroom was set on the north-western side of the house, just enough to be warmed in the evening without facing the glare of the sun head-on. Bentley sighed, stretched over the back of the EZ-Liftr Lite, and almost fell off when the door slid open. Thankfully, it was only Torako. Unfortunately, she had noticed.

“Haha, got you and I wasn’t even _trying_ ,” she said, grinning. She had twigs in her hair and a couple scrapes on her face. “And hot damn you’ve been busy—wait, is that Comeback Kid? Talk about nostalgic.”

“That’s a lot all at once,” Bentley said, shifting the EZ-Liftr Lite so that he wasn’t halfway to a concussion via headfirst fall to the floor. “And I don’t know what you’re talking about, nobody got me at anything.”

Torako snorted and entered the room to better peer at the corner Bentley was working on. He only had a little more to go before the ceiling was done, but then there was the rest of the detailing. “Keep deluding yourself, I know the truth. And that _is_ Comeback Kid! Wait wait wait—is this ‘Mr. Bittenbinder’? It’s gotta be ‘Mr. Bittenbinder.’ Is this the top tracks playlist?” 

“Yes,” Bentley said. He turned his attention to the current space ahead of him, hummed, then added a few more dots in aesthetically pleasing places.

“Why?” Torako flicked a finger at his socked foot. Bentley twitched it back before scowling down at her. She grinned, unapologetic. “It’s been ages. Like, since high school.”

“You listened plenty in college, I remember you blasting it whenever I brought you stuff in the gym,” Bentley said. He pointed the paintbrush in his hand at her—gold, just enough left in the bristles that he could leave a mark if he wanted to. “But yeah, I was thinking about home. With—Dad.”

“Oh,” Torako said. Her face softened. “Yeah, now that you say it, I can see the similarity to your bedroom. Back then, I mean.”

He smiled at her, then turned his attention back to the ceiling. After a few strokes, a few quiet moments filled with the discordant keys of “Mr. Bittenbinder,” Bentley let out an ‘ah’ as he came to a realization. “If you—sorry for taking over things and making this my childhood—I mean, you had a childhood bedroom too, you know, and—”

“Aw, lighten up, buddy,” Torako said. She patted his leg. “I’m not angry or upset or anything. Your bedroom was cool. Just let me put up some old hurling photos or stash my stick on the wall as some kind of deco and it’ll bring enough of me in. I like the stars, anyways. It’ll be nice to have them up at night.”

Bentley reached over with his free hand and ruffled her hair. A couple twigs and half of a leaf were dislodged and fell to the ground. “Thanks,” he said. He thought a moment. “What about Dipper?”

“We’ll see if he has anything he wants here in particular that aren’t too, you know. It’ll work out. It’ll be all of ours,” she said. Then, tilting her head so his hand was more on her forehead than in her hair (and how odd it was for her to be looking up at him), she grinned. “Need any help painting?”

“Uh,” Bentley said. The memory of their college fridge, covered in drawings of Korato and Alcor, flashed through his mind. “I, uh, that’s very nice of you but, how do I say it—”

“Your drawings suck,” Dipper said from over Bentley’s shoulder. Even feeling him tesser in wasn’t enough to stop Bentley from startling. This time, it took both Dipper and Torako reaching in to steady the Liftr and pushing him back onto it in order to keep Bentley from falling off. His glasses were still knocked askew from the jostling.

“Look what you did!" Torako said, wiggling her index and middle fingers together at Dipper, mock scowl on her face. “You nearly made him fall—what if he’d hit his head?”

“Even if he had fallen, he would’ve been fine,” Dipper said. He narrowed his eyes at her fingers. Bentley nudged his glasses back into place. In the background, “Mr. Bittenbinder” finally drew to its eight-minute close. “I would have caught him. You’re just mad that I said you suck at drawing.”

Torako rolled her eyes. “I _know_ I suck, I just thought I’d lighten the mood, you doofus. Anyways—the reason I came in here in the first place was to see if Bentley wanted dinner. It’s a bit early, but I’m hungry and we’ve all been working hard today. How was whosit over in Europe?”

“Oh, Olla?” Dipper flipped upside down and drew his legs together, criss-crossed, as the song track changed to “Then I Didn’t”. His gaze remained fixed on Torako’s outstretched fingers. “She’s doing great, working hard at school and all that. Had to skedaddle before her mom came home and ripped me apart, but it was a good visit overall.”

“Rip you apart?” Bentley said. He lifted his brush and picked up where he left off painting. “If she can do that, I think you’ve lost your position as most powerful being in existence.”

“Did he have it in the first pla—ow, what the fuck Dipper, my fingers!”

“Serves you right,” Dipper said. His voice crackled with half-realized laughter. “Stick your fingers in my face and get bit.”

“I’ll bite _you_ , you little—”

Dipper’s voice got all low and purr-y. Some half-forgotten instinct in Bentley tensed. “Where you gonna bite me huh, sugar?”

There was a pause. Bentley pulled his paintbrush away from the ceiling. Not a second later, Torako said, “Where you want me to bite, honey? Here, or here, or…here?”

“If I look down,” Bentley said, “and you two are playing het chicken in front of me, at this moment in time, while I have paint and you don’t, we are going to have yesterday happen again except I am going to _win_. Hands-down. I will decimate you.”

Bentley gave them three seconds before he looked down. When he did, they were staring up at him, Torako’s outstretched finger brushing against one of Dipper’s collarbones, his shirt collar unbuttoned just enough to give her access. They blinked—at the same time, eerily enough at the exact time Jonathan from The Comeback Kid crooned after a long piano solo, _‘Oh, but I couldn’t, I just couldn’t stop myself, the pages were calling but the party’s calling louder…’_

He pointed his paintbrush at them. “Don’t.”

Torako laughed, and what tension there was in the room dissipated. She papped Dipper’s cheek, looking into his eyes, and said, “Well, looks like we’ll have to save this for another time. His Majesty commands us.”

“Well, if it’s His Majesty’s edict…” Dipper grinned and swung himself back upright to lay on thin air, his chin propped on an open palm. “Would you also like food, your Majesty? We could go back and get it started while you finish here.”

Bentley narrowed his eyes. “This is a very sudden change of topic.”

“True,” Torako agreed. “But it’s like, five, and if we divide and conquer, we can get stuff done. I’ll paint tomorrow, and I’m sure Dipper could get a room done right now if we throw him a bag of Peach Wheels.”

“Make it a bag of Peach Wheels and a TimTom Bar, and we have a deal,” Dipper said.

Without looking, Torako slid her hand out. “Kitchen in royal blue with gold trim and switch out the cabinets and countertops for that Eggshell White we saw in HomeReno Catalogue #539 Issue twenty…three, yeah, sure, deal.”

“Ugh, fine,” Dipper said. There was a flash of blue flames. He frowned and patted his stomach. His stomach. Bentley’s turned at the thought, cold nothingness tickling at the back of his mind before he bit at the side of his mouth to bring his attention back into the present. “—hard bargain, now. When did you even learn that trick? Tacking on specifics in the seconds you go for the handshake.”

“I live with you, dumbass,” Torako said. She ruffled his hair and ignored the way Dipper hissed and patted it back into place. “Also, I have a degree in this shit. Practice makes perfect—anyways, Dipper, Bentley, how do we feel about fried rice tonight? Lettuce wraps?”

“Sounds good,” Bentley said. He pushed the thought of—that—out of mind and resolved to bring it up with his therapist the next time they met. Lifting his paintbrush back up, he added, “I’ll try to be back by six or six-thirty, okay?”

Torako nodded. “Call us when you leave, okay? And if anything happens on the way back, it doesn’t matter who’s around, just summon Dips—”

Bentley paused, turned his head, and stared at Torako. “I’m not going to summon Alcor the Dreambender in the middle of the street,” he said.

“Ok,” Torako said. “Just—be careful, okay?”

“Yeah, I promise,” Bentley said. It was easy to—the streets were well lit, and it would be early enough when he left that anybody involved in Norfolk’s relatively low crime rate was unlikely to be active. Also, Fantino was dead and nobody else had any hare-brained ideas about Bentley being a Mizar or something like that.

Torako grinned. It was a little strained. Bentley narrowed his eyes when he remembered that Torako _still_ hadn’t started looking for a therapist they could all bully into signing a ridiculous NDA. Bentley still thought that Dr. Anikulapo-Kuti would be a good fit, but Torako kept avoiding the topic.

He sighed, then reached out his hand. “Nothing is going to happen,” he said, threading his fingers through her hair. “And if it does, I’ll be prepared. I promise.”

“Yeah,” Dipper said. He patted her shoulders with both hands and hooked his chin over one of them. “Ben’s tough, he can take care of himself—and just in case anything _does_ happen, I’ll keep an extra close eye on the bond, okay?

Torako closed her eyes. She tipped her head to rest against Dipper’s. “Yeah,” she said. “You’re right.”

“Besides,” Dipper said, giving Bentley a sly look before tilting his head to whisper in her ear. She grinned and giggled a little, eyes cutting over to Dipper and then to Bentley and back again. Bentley’s suspicions resurfaced. He narrowed his eyes. From his phone on the ground, the ‘15% battery left’ alarm chirped a whistly little tune over the final stanza of “Then I Didn’t”.

“You want me to pass you your phone so you can charge it?” Torako asked, already leaning over to pick the phone up from off the ground. The sound quality wobbled a bit as the speakers adjusted from reverbing off a solid surface and to sounding through the open air.

“Sure,” Bentley said, switching his brush to the opposite hand so that he could receive the phone more easily. He held his hand out and wiggled his fingers.

Dipper threaded his fingers through Bentley’s.

“Um,” Bentley said. He blinked across at Dipper. “Not that I don’t appreciate it, but I was actually going for my phone?”

Dipper grinned, wide and a little soft. “I know,” he said. “That’s why I did it.”

Then, Torako jammed his cold phone down the front of his sweater. Bentley yelped, jerked, and they all went down in a tangle of limbs. Somehow Bentley managed to be sandwiched between Dipper and Torako, whose arm was still stuck down his sweater.

“Torako!” Bentley screeched, his hand still comfortably in Dipper’s. They both burst into cackles, one cut through with bursts of static, the other clear and resounding. Bentley scowled up at Torako and the line of gold that slid wet down the curve of her cheek. Seconds later, a grin fought its way past the façade and he couldn’t help but laugh along. This really could be home, he thought.

* * *

“I can’t stand it,” Torako groaned from where she was sprawled face-down on the floor. “I can’t do it, Bentley.”

“Yes you can,” he said from his seat at the kitchen table that they had found in an antique store. It was a little inconvenient in that it didn’t have functions to store and consequently automatically drape tablecloths, but it also wasn’t an eyesore first thing in the morning without his glasses, so everybody considered it a win.

“Bentley, it’s not a proper _home_ yet,” she said into the floorboards. Dipper rolled his eyes and sipped at the overly sweetened coffee he’d exchanged for dragging Torako from where she’d been languishing on the bed.

“Torako, we don’t even have a couch yet,” Bentley said. “Or mirrors other than the one in the bathroom. How do bedside tables even make a home in the first place?”

“It’s a place to put all your stuff,” Torako said. “That you need when you’re sleeping but don’t want to get up to get and I’ve fallen out of bed _five times_ this week reaching for my water bottle.”

“I keep saying that I have furniture at my house,” Dipper said. Bentley eyed the scratches in the rim of the mug—even after millennia of being a demon, Dipper kept forgetting to watch his teeth around the dishware. “But you guys are all nooo, what if it’s haunted, nooo, what if the demonic energy, nooooooo.”

“I had enough problems dealing with your ambient energy affecting things like security sensors when I first started working at the company,” Bentley drawled, hands curled around his own cup of tea. “And now? _With_ this incomprehensible body? I don’t need even more exposure. Besides, everything we’ve vetted hasn’t passed Torako’s ‘Bentley Safe’ test.”

“Except the coffee table,” Dipper pointed out.

“Except the coffee table,” Bentley ceded. It was the ugliest coffee table he’d seen, but it was solid wood and was void of any enchantments or extra tech, unlike everything else they had been able to find. Any demonic energy that had lingered on it had dissipated in hours without a supernatural handhold. 

“Unfortunately,” Torako groaned, “Bentley makes sense. I hate it, but Bentley makes sense. Bentley, stop making sense. I want bedside tables.”

Dipper sipped at his coffee extra loud. Bentley raised his eyebrows in Torako’s direction, even if she couldn’t see them. “Well,” he said. “I seem to recall that we did have bedside tables that weren’t very magical except around the hinges, and you could barely see those anyways. I wonder what happened to them?”

Torako groaned extra loud. She turned her head just so that she could glare at him past the hair in her face. “One of them fell _apart_ when we dropped it off,” Torako said. “Like, legitimately, we put it down and it collapsed.”

“But you could have had one,” Dipper pointed out. He drummed his claws against the tabletop. Bentley squinted at the little pricks that started forming in the surface and realized that he was going to have to figure out how to non-magically reinforce the surface. Somehow, he didn’t think that Dipper would react well to claw-caps. “Then just Bentley would have to suffer.”

“And I’m okay with that,” Bentley said, still staring at the claw dents.

There was a pause. Bentley blinked, then registered what he said and started waving his hands. “Wait—no, I meant, like, I don’t mind not having a bedside table for a little longer, Torako’s the one who keeps falling out of bed, not me, she needs the table, it’s not that—”

“Hey,” Dipper said, frowning. He reached over and slid his hand over Bentley’s, eyebrows serious over his dark eyes. “Being the masochist is _my_ job.”

After a beat, Torako burst into laughter. Bentley considered the ramifications of threatening Dipper bodily harm, and dismissed them very quickly on the grounds of ‘this will never end if I do.’

“Anyways,” Bentley said in a voice just loud enough to be clearly heard over Torako’s giggling, “We’ll figure out the bedside table thing. In the meantime, Torako, you could always take one of the chairs and use it.”

His chair shuddered a little and there was a smacking noise. Bentley looked down to see Torako’s hand wrapped around the chair leg, her hair tangled between her eyes. “This chair?” she asked. Then she looked at Dipper and wheezed.

“I think I don’t need to answer that,” Bentley said. “Why do you keep laughing, anyways? It wasn’t even that funny?”

“Rude,” Dipper said.

“Is…” Torako choked out. “Is because he—oh gosh, he’s _unemployed_ , Bentley!”

Dipper scowled at her. “Am too employed,” he said.

“As a _maSOCHIST_!” Torako screeched out the last word and started smacking her feet against the ground and howling in laughter. Then she squealed when Dipper leapt over the table (and Bentley) to get at her.

Bentley shifted his teacup in his hands and felt himself settle further. His phone pinged a notification as Torako and Dipper began to actually wrestle on the floor. He took one look at the phone, winced a little at how sparkly it was, and slid his glasses on to check the notification.

At first, it didn’t make sense. He couldn’t remember having any business with Celestial Spaces Storage Services. That branch didn’t even exist out in Norfolk, that was strictly a Federation thing. The only ties he had there were Torako’s parents and his dad’s urn in the City Ancestral Home. The apartment had long been leased to… _wait_. The apartment. Bentley opened the message.

_Dear Customer,_

_We hope this message finds you well. We write to inform you that your lease on Unit 4968 is set to expire approximately one month from now, on October 24 th, 4042. Please indicate to us whether or not you would like to renew your lease or change the terms. We are accessible by phone, message, or in person at the facility you rented space from._

_Thank you for your time,_

_L’lanee Etchen_

_Celestial Spaces Storage Services_

“Oh,” he said out loud. In his bare hands, the battery ticked up from 88% to 89%. “I forgot.”

“Forgot what?” Dipper asked. Bentley looked up from his phone to see him laying on the floor, Torako’s heel in the small of his back and both his arms wrenched up and behind him. Bentley winced at the thought of him in that position, but of course Dipper was nonplussed. His wings were relaxed and everything.

Torako, on the other hand, was panting a little, cheeks dark and hair even wilder than it already had been. “Forgot what?” she asked. “How _awesome_ I am at wrestling?”

“Dad’s…stuff,” he said. Torako blinked and let go of Dipper’s wrists. “The stuff from our apartment, the lease on storage is expiring.”

“Oh,” said Torako. She sat down on Dipper’s back. He let out a soft whoof of air that was more for fun than because Torako was pressing down on his non-existent lungs. “I forgot too.”

Dipper reached back and jabbed at Torako’s sides until she squirmed far enough off of him that he could sit up. “It sounds familiar,” he said, peering up at Bentley from where he was nestled under Torako’s chin. “What do you want to do, then? For the right price, I can always blip it all here.”

Bentley opened his mouth to refuse. Then he closed it, tapped his forefingers against the face of the still-warm teacup, and considered Dipper. “Our living room is pretty empty,” he said. “No sofa or bookshelves yet. All our stuff there is still in boxes.”

“And it would be very economical,” Dipper wheedled. There was a glint in his eye that never failed to set some very deep, animal part of Bentley’s brain on edge. He was good at pushing past it by now, though.

“In one sense of the word,” Bentley said. He pulled one hand off his teacup and set his chin in the heart of his palm. “But what would you want in exchange for this little chore?”

Torako lifted an eyebrow. Her eyes flicked momentarily down to Dipper before she met Bentley’s eyes again. Bentley closed his eyes and shook his head a little; he could handle a deal like this.

Alcor intertwined his fingers together in such a way that only his index fingers were free, flush against each other as he pressed the tips of them to his chin. He suddenly had gloves on. “Good question,” he said. The reverb in his voice had grown stronger, a little deeper. He sounded like he knew the answers to all your questions, had the power to fulfill every desire you had, and would never sink his fingers into your chest to pull out your soul.

Not that, you know, that part actually mattered to Bentley, what with his soul not even being his to begin with. Dipper’s actual sister had given it up millennia ago. 

Bentley hummed. “I agree, it was,” he said. “So what would _you_ say is a fair price?”

Alcor’s face was relaxed even as he draped an arm over Torako’s bent knee. “Usually I’d ask for a couple of teeth, an eye, maybe your left pinky—something noticeable for all these priceless, sentimental items I’d have to transport out of an extra-dimensional plane into this very well warded house. But it’s your lucky day! For you and just you, I’ll do it for the low, low price of one treasured memory of your father!”

Bentley swallowed and tried to not let the grief well back up. He closed his eyes, considered the deal for half a second, and then dismissed it completely. Memories with his dad were priceless. He wasn’t going to be able to make any new ones.

“Dipper, what the fuck,” Torako said. Bentley opened his eyes to see her leaning back a bit. Dipper flinched, and something about his face shifted. He leaned forward, towards Bentley, his cheeks softening to something less twenty-five and more sixteen.

“Bentley, I—”

“You’re right,” Bentley said. He looked Dipper right in his wide, childish eyes. “That is a lot of work. It wouldn’t be fair to ask you for something so big you can’t resist crossing lines.”

“I shouldn’t have asked anyways,” Dipper said. He twined his fingers together and worried them against each other. “That was wrong, I know it was wrong and I did it anyways because it was right there and it seemed—it was just. Tempting.”

“I understand,” said Bentley. He rubbed at his temples. “I’ll call the company and ask what it would cost to ship everything here.”

“That would be so expensive,” Torako said. She leaned back forward, smoothed her hands over Dippers, and tucked his head under her chin again. It was easier than it had been before. “The Federation is so far, and then there’s customs to go through, and we’d have to choose an option that didn’t rely on shipping things with exdim spaces.”

Bentley inhaled and then exhaled, deep. “I’ll call the company,” he said, again.

That night, Torako dragged a chair from the dining room and set it up by her side of the bed. She still, somehow, managed to fall out by reaching out too far for her water bottle.

* * *

What ended up happening was this:

Bentley called the company to extend the lease. Then he called the company again, after a couple days of first arguing and then discussing the details with Torako, to ask if actually they could arrange a video tour of everything in the unit. After the company explained that they didn’t have the time or resources to devote to that (which was utter bull, but Bentley wasn’t willing to shell money out for the Perk Plan Copper Edition), Torako took time to physically travel to them, visited her parents, and used her phone to show Bentley around the place.

It was nostalgic, but the level of magical interference was faintly visible even through the screen _and_ his glasses. Bentley was glad that he let Torako argue him out of going himself. When he made soft eyes at the long, old dresser from his father’s bedroom, Torako slapped a ‘removal’ sticker on it without hesitation (“We can put it in the living room or by the entrance or whatever, there’s definitely a place for it somewhere!”). When Torako started cackling over the ugliest coat rack in existence, awkwardly heavy and brassy at the ends of each hook, Bentley didn’t protest too much over her demands to bring it back (“It’ll go with that awful coffee table Dips brought back, I _love it so much._ ”) When Dipper showed up halfway through the call and interrupted their discussion over the merits of bringing or leaving the sofa with its simple seat-warming enchantments, Bentley cackled at Torako’s initial screech of surprise and then Dipper’s squawk as she wrestled him down to ruffle his hair (“Sea’s mercy, don’t sneak up on me like that—say, what do you think about this couch, it’s got enchantments but I think my dads can hook me up with somebody who can strip it off…”) When discussion turned to a possible matching (mostly) set of lamps that Dipper had stashed somewhere, Bentley set his chin on his hand and watched his family go back and forth about logistics and re-wiring and oh, wasn’t that a really nice bookshelf, wouldn’t that look good in the house too.

In the end, they found nearly everything they wanted, arranged to have the whole lot of it shipped by non-magical means (paid for by Torako’s dads, who were apparently side-eyeing Dipper with less fear and apprehension than they had initially), and came home. It would take a month for everything to arrive but until then—

“It’s come to this,” Torako said, laced fingers under her nose, elbows set to the sides of her empty dinner plate. “We need to search harder than ever for the final, most vital piece of our home.”

“The bedside tables?” Dipper asked sullenly. He scowled down at the vibrant claw tips Torako had slipped on him while he was napping earlier. “You don’t deserve them, you heathen.”

“Even heathens deserve bedside tables,” Torako countered, eyes bright with something Bentley couldn’t name. “It’s a basic right of Personhood.”

“You violated _my_ Personhood,” Dipper hissed, eyes narrowed in mock-betrayal as he wiggled his capped claws at her. “You don’t _deserve_ a bedside table. Besides, _I_ don’t even get a bedside table, so why should you?”

“I keep telling you,” Bentley said after taking a sip of his water, “if you want a shelf above the bed, we can put one up there for things you wanted to put up there that weren’t, like, eyeballs or the shriveled dismembered fingers of that one dude who tried to enslave you when you were a baby demon.”

“I also veto the cursed paperweight that croons the regretful thoughts of all office workers ever into your dreams,” Torako said with a shudder. “For more than just the fact that it might be a pain to Bentley. It’s just super, _super_ disturbing.”

“You have no taste,” Dipper sniffed. He gnawed a little at the rubber claw caps and then made a face. “Also, these are _disgusting_.”

Bentley couldn’t stop himself from laughing a little. He avoided Dipper’s wide betrayed eyes and looked out the kitchen window instead. It faced the front, where there was a little pathway leading up to the house and there was a stone wall that was covered with aesthetically pleasing moss. Dipper had said it was installed a couple centuries ago, when everybody had their ‘ye olde cottage in the woods’ phase. Bentley liked it, at least. He watched as a small songbird, dark brown back over light brown belly interrupted by a dull crest of yellow, fluttered down to perch on top of it. It cocked its head this way and that, then trilled out a few notes.

“Sucks to be you; you keep putting holes in our super hard-to-find dining table, we take preventative measures,” Torako said. Outside, the bird hopped forward a couple steps.

“Could have just told me,” Dipper groused. “Woulda stopped.”

“Not nearly as much fun,” Torako said. “Now—the bedside tables. The Quest to end all Quests. The most honorable, invaluable, unbelievably necessary endeavor yet on our long journey towards houseownership.”

The songbird pecked down once, twice, and picked up a twig. Bentley watched it fly off with its prize. Weird, he thought, that a bird might make its nest in fall.

He blinked. “Why not make our own bedside tables?”

When he turned to look at them again, Torako was blinking in mild confusion. Dipper had stopped chewing at the rubber caps that he could absolutely take off himself but didn’t for whatever reason. “I thought you didn’t have power tools?”

Bentley frowned. “Power tools? I’m not going to…I don’t have any magical tools, remember? We got rid of everything overly magical.” Even the wards could have been a pain to deal with if Torako hadn’t researched and then integrated the time-consuming, archaic, and possibly illegal additions that rendered the wards magical signature null.

Dipper sighed. “Mechanical saws that go buzzity buzz through wood and stuff to make it the size you want. Or things to screw in screws without agitating your wrist. Machines.”

“Oh,” Bentley said. “Yeah, Tristools. The library has a workshop; we could find the right materials and make our own with their resident Carpenter?”

Without warning, Torako stood up and slammed the table. The dishes clanged and clattered as they were jostled, and Bentley only barely saved his water from spilling everywhere. Dipper screeched, his hair fluffing up and out in momentary alarm.

“Bentley!” Torako yelled. “You’re a _genius_.”

Bentley blinked at her rapidly. His fingers curled around his glass protectively. “I…thank you? I guess?”

“I am going to make,” Torako said, a terrifying grin on her face, “the biggest, baddest, most amazing bedside tables _ever_.”

“Oh,” Bentley said. He tugged the glass closer, as if he could stop Torako’s enthusiasm from bubbling over and making everything more complicated than any of them could handle just by protecting his water. “Oh, no, Torako, we just need—we just need function. We just need something we can put things like pain medication in and water bottles on.”

“That’s boring,” Dipper said. He was floating off his chair, a matching grin on his face. “And we’re not boring, we need _exciting_ furniture. _Personalized_ furniture. Furniture with as many non-magical bells and whistles as we can _manage_.”

Neither of them, as far as Bentley knew, had built anything in their lives. Dipper tended towards destruction anyways—and thinking of Torako’s several collisions with opposing hurling players that ended in somebody with fractured ribs or concussions or, in one memorable case, a flattened nose that needed emergency on-site reconstruction, so did Torako. “Guys,” he said weakly. “Think—manageable projects?”

“I want a carved _dragon_ in mine,” Torako said. Then she gasped. “No, wait— _Korato_ holding _Alcor_ in her arms as they’re flying off on a carved dragon—oh I have to write everything down.”

“Mine is going to have so many hidden drawers,” Dipper said, in spite of the fact that he wasn’t going to use a bedroom table. “So many traps to dissuade thieving fingers. You won’t be able to open anything without first solving the initial puzzle lock. I can’t _wait_ , I have so many ideas.”

“Just…a drawer?” Bentley offered out, loudly so that Torako could hear him from where she had burst into the master bedroom. “Maybe a couple shelves? A flat surface? Maybe a fancy handle for the drawer if they have them?”

“It’s gonna be A WORK OF ART,” screeched Torako from across the house. Dipper had dissolved into muttering about which traps and tricks would be best for its size, and they could mount it on the wall so it could have a secret bottom that held all the best things.

Bentley looked down at his water, and could only think about the poor resident Carpenter who would be dealing with them all.

* * *

“I’m so sorry,” he said to Mx. Tchaikovsky, resident Carpenter at their nearest expanded Library, as zi looked first at their plans, then at the materials they had sourced and brought with them. Zir nameplate, which displayed zir name and pronouns, fritzed a couple times before steadying out. “I tried to talk them out of it, but…”

Mx. Tchaikovsky looked at him. Then, zi grinned wide and said, “Are you kidding? These are the greatest things I’ve ever seen!”

Behind Mx. Tchaikovsky’s back, Torako and Dipper high-fived each other. Bentley made the mistake of making incredulous eye contact with them. In response, Dipper put his thumb on his nose, crossed his eyes, and wiggled his fingers at Bentley. The gesture was unfamiliar; the childish, gloating triumph on his face was not.

“I…” Bentley said, slowly, “I thought that they would be too…complicated for our skill level. Those two, at least,” He said, tapping the plans that he knew weren’t his.

“Oh, for sure,” Mx. Tchaikovsky said. Zi half-turned to Torako and Dipper, and asked, “You two don’t have any carpentry experience, do you?”

Dipper opened his mouth. “I made a custom bedroom set for my—for a child, once,” he said. Bentley, who had not seen Dipper do anything without using supernatural powers ever, widened his eyes at him. Dipper clearly saw, but elected to say nothing.

“Oh wow,” Mx. Tchaikovsky said. “That’s really cool! Do you have any pics? How many pieces was it? Were there any custom decorations? What tools did you use? I want to know what you’re familiar with in here.”

This time, it was Bentley who felt that cathartic burst of childish triumph. Dipper laughed and started scratching at the back of his neck. “Oh, sorry, I—it’s a running joke we have after somebody misheard me say that I had _commissioned_ a custom bedroom set for a child, nobody’s child in particular, just a child that I thought needed a custom bedroom set with appropriate thematic imagery, I haven’t used any of these tools, but that’s fine because you, a professional, a professional carpenter employed by the Library, is here to help us and I think that’s just great, don’t you? Say, Torako, what experience do you have??”

Torako grinned. “Nothing and you know it, dweebus.”

Mx. Tchaikovsky returned the smile, long, thin hands on zir hips. “Okay, great to hear! Thanks for being honest, I really appreciate it. What about you, Mr…Farkas, right? You got any experience?”

Bentley repressed the urge to stick out his tongue at Dipper and turned his attention to Mx. Tchaikovsky. “I took a couple sculpture classes in undergrad and used some tools there—a 3D printer, a pattern cutter, and a handheld rotary tool, if I remember right—but it’s been several years.”

Mx. Tchaikovsky nodded, then stroked zir chin. “Okay, I see what’s happened—you know how hard it’s going to be and how much time it’s going to take, whereas these two—” Zi gestured at Torako and Dipper “—don’t have an idea of what they’re getting into. But, like, if you guys are willing to spend a significant amount of time on these custom bedside tables…why not go for something you want in your life for a long time?”

Bentley blinked at zir. He looked around the room, machinery piled against the walls, spare materials organized (mostly) into shelves and containers. The thin light from an overcast sky filtered in through the windows and highlighted lazily floating dust motes. “Huh,” he said, a little quietly. He looked back at Mx. Tchaikovsky. “You sure that wouldn’t be too much work for you?”

“It would be a challenge,” Zi admitted, still grinning a little, lopsided, and zir boot scuffed against the concrete flooring. “For everybody, really. But I like teaching, and if things get too difficult to manage partway through, we can improvise and level down.”

A glance at both Torako and Dipper told Bentley everything he needed to know about what they thought of _levelling down_. To be fair, he thought, he was also feeling…competitive. “Okay,” he said, holding a hand out for his previous proposal application. “I can change it up.”

Torako and Dipper high-fived again. Mx. Tchaikovsky said, “That’s the spirit!” and handed over the proposal. Bentley took the holographic file in his gloved hand and looked down at it, before smiling over at Torako and Dipper.

His design was going to _crush_ theirs.

* * *

In late November, they were finally able to take their monstrous creations home. Monstrous, in Dipper’s case, meant that he’d made an almost seamless shelving unit that they installed above the bed for a package of shrimp chips. Even if anybody were to figure out how to get into the hidden drawers in each wide span of wood framing the open shelves, they would be very hard pressed to not lose any fingers (or noses) in the process. In Torako’s case, it meant that her bulky, stupidly heavy bedside table that was more sculpture than functional furniture was so dense that it took bribing Dipper with a pint of ice cream and a bag of anatomically correct gummy hearts (scaled down) to get it from the workshop and into the bedroom. Torako had gleefully chucked the dining room chair out into the garden the morning they went to pick up their pieces—and then promptly was made to go outside into the snow to get the chair because “Those were a bitch to find, Torako, and if you’ve broken it you get to fix it.”

In Bentley’s case, it was simply shaped, fairly light-weight. The overall shape was rather boxy, as opposed to Torako’s (hourglass) or Dipper’s (in a word: aerodynamic). There was a single drawer above an empty space at the bottom for any larger things he might need. The biggest visual difference, however were the flowers carved into the sides and carved into the top of the table—spider lilies, vibrant reds and yellows and greens standing out from a dark-varnished background. They had been painstakingly carved, and recurved, and glued back together when the support was too weak and he went too far. Then they had been painted, shaded, dusted here and there with shimmering gold powder, and on the underside of one petal near the bottom-right corner, Bentley had very carefully inscribed his name as small as he could.

He set the bedside table down, took a step back, and looked the room over. Torako was sprawled across the bed to take up as much space as possible. Dipper was floating upside-down in the corner. Their tables—new, custom made—matched even less than the rest of the furniture in the house, cobbled together from several sources and time periods. Bentley appreciated matching furniture and themes as much as anybody but somehow this just…suited them. He rubbed at his mismatched hands, and smiled a little.

“So,” Dipper asked, hair unbound and floating around him in a way he probably thought was cool but just made him look even dorkier than usual. “Why spider lilies?”

Bentley thought about it for two seconds, then said, “Because they’re the most stupid difficult flower I could think of to render in three dimensions?”

Muffled by the pillow she had her face pressed into, Torako said, “I _knew_ it, you competitive little shit! You couldn’t just let me have my figure of the three of us, you had to outdo me!”

“Three of us?” Bentley asked. He looked at the flying dragon (that resembled more of a badger than anything else) and the two figures on its back that made up the support for the top of her table and narrowed his eyes. He knew the one in something resembling armor was Korato, and the figure with too-long arms draped across Korato’s back was Alcor, but he didn’t see anything like…

Dipper started cackling. “He’s the dragon?? The dragon!!”

“A talking dragon,” Torako said, rolling over so that she could speak easier. “I decided it halfway through the project—it just. Made more sense if it was all three of us, you know?”

With a sigh, Bentley stepped forward and flopped onto the bed, half-on Torako’s legs. “Goddammit,” he said. “If it’s all three of us, I guess you win.”

She laughed. Dipper sputtered. “But—but look at how smooth and seamless mine is! How perfectly hair-trigger the traps are! It’s even and sleek and beautiful and I can’t _believe_ you’re saying Torako won!”

“Torako’s may be ridiculously heavy and technically unrefined,” Bentley said, curling over onto his side so he could look Dipper better in the eyes, “but she made me a _dragon_. She wins.”

“Also you hella cheated,” Torako said, pointing a finger up at Dipper. “Even Mx Tchaikovsky was baffled as to how you managed a couple of those traps, and zi held our hands all the way through this mess. You definitely used a couple tricks to get things to work.”

Dipper flushed all the way to the tips of his pointed ears. “So what?? I used the tools at my disposal, and I made the _perfect_ trap furniture.”

“Bentley got second place,” Torako said. She reached down to scrunch her fingers into Bentley’s hair. He sighed and tipped his head back a little, eyes sliding shut as she began to lightly massage his scalp.

“What the _heck_!” Dipper said. The air itself bristled a little. Bentley inhaled deep, counted to three, and exhaled slow. “The _heck_ ,” Dipper said, the air loosening up again. “You two are—you’re in cahoots! You have to be!”

“So take some pics and show them to other people,” Torako drawled. Her leg shifted underneath Bentley, and he obligingly lifted his weight so that she could rearrange herself into a more comfortable position. “Or, instead, you could join our ‘the house is finally a home’ victory snuggles.”

“That’s what these are?” Bentley asked, draping an arm over Torako’s waist.

“Yes,” she said, her fingers moving out of the way so that she could press a kiss to the crown of his head. “That’s exactly what these are. Yo, Dipper, you going to sulk or you going to cuddle?”

“Both,” Dipper grumbled before settling in on Bentley’s other side, an arm sliding over his side and curling around his chest. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten this injustice.”

Bentley hummed. “Okay,” he said, and shifted himself further up the bed. “You do that, buddy.”

After a moment, warm between their bodies and under the soft cover of sunlight coming in the window, Bentley heard Dipper whisper to Torako, “So—you happy with everything?”

“Yeah,” Torako said, after a moment. Her long fingers stilled on his head. “Yeah, this is good. This is—really, really good.”

A heartbeat, and then Dipper, soft: “I’m glad.”


End file.
